Int. J. Engng Ed. Vol. 17, Nos. 4 and 5, pp. 426±430, 2001
Printed in Great Britain.
0949-149X/91 $3.00+0.00
# 2001 TEMPUS Publications.
Dimensions of Teamwork Education*
RENATE FRUCHTER
Director of Project Based Learning Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305±4020, USA. E-mail: fruchter@cive.stanford.edu
This paper discusses key issues related to the pedagogical approach, the learning and team work
culture, the choice and scope of projects, collaboration and information technologies employed, and
new metrics and assessment methods that need to be considered in the development and deployment
of team-oriented, project-based cross-disciplinary teamwork education programs.
The development of PBL builds on cognitive and
situative learning theory [1±4] as well as on design
theory [5, 6].
INTRODUCTION
THIS PAPER is about teamwork education at the
start of the 21st century and beyond. It presents
key dimensions in the development, implementation, and assessment of an Architecture/Engineering/Construction (A/E/C) education program that
was launched at Stanford in 93/94 and presents
its 6th generation during the academic year 98/99.
The course takes a multi-site, cross-disciplinary,
project-based, team-oriented approach to learning
and mentoring. The following dimensions of
teamwork education include PBL, participants,
content, projects, information technology, and
assessment.
PARTICIPANT DIMENSIONS
The A/E/C teamwork in PBL creates a new
culture that brings together faculty, practitioners,
and students from the different disciplines. Each
plays a well-defined role in the program, such as
undergraduate students play the role of apprentice,
M.Sc. students play the role of journeyman,
faculty, and industry practitioners play the role
of mentor, coach, or owner. The vision behind
developing this learning environment is the master
builder's atelier projected into the information age.
The key atom in the A/E/C program is the A/E/C
team. Each team has one architect, one structural
engineer, one construction manager and one or
two apprentices. Each team has an owner with a
program, a budget, a time line, and a site. All
students have access to a pool of mentors from all
three disciplines. Students collect real industry
data from the mentors and discuss their ideas
and solutions with them. Each team is required
to talk with at least two mentors from each discipline. This offers the students an interesting perspective that indicates multiple approaches and
solutions for a design problem. The 6th generation
of the A/E/C course has been launched in 98/99 as
an international pilot that includes universities
from US, i.e. Stanford University, UC Berkeley
and Georgia Tech; Europe, i.e. Strathclyde
University, Glasgow, UK, and Slovenia, Ljubljana, and Japan, i.e. Aoyama Gakuin University.
Teams are typically in three or four time zones, e.g.
architect at Georgia Tech, structural engineer at
Stanford, construction manager in Glasgow, and
apprentice at Stanford.
The design of the PBL lab is grounded in
cognitive and situative learning theory. The cognitive perspective characterizes learning in terms of
growth of conceptual understanding and general
strategies of thinking and understanding [1].
The design of the A/E/C PBLÐto provide team
PBL DIMENSIONS
The A/E/C education program is based on a
PBL pedagogical approach, where PBL stands for
Problem/Project/Product/Process/People-Based
Learning. PBL is a methodology of teaching and
learning that focuses on problem based, project
organized activities that produce a product for a
client. PBL is based on re-engineered processes that
bring people from multiple disciplines together.
Project-based learning proposes a teaching and
learning approach that focuses on improving and
broadening the competence of engineering
students to:
. understand the role of theoretical and real-world
discipline-specific knowledge in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative, practical project-centered
environment;
. recognize the relationship of the engineering
enterprise to the social/economic/political context of engineering practice and the key role of
this context in engineering decisions, and
. learn how to participate in and lead multidisciplinary teams to design and build environmentally conscious and high quality facilities
faster and more economically.
* Accepted 30 November 2000.
426
Dimensions of Teamwork Education
interaction with the professor, industry mentors
and team ownersÐprovides a structure for modeling and coaching which scaffolds the learning
process, both in the design and construction
phases, as well as for techniques such as
articulating and reflecting on cognitive processes.
The situative perspective shifts the focus of
analysis from individual behavior and cognition
to larger systems that include individual agents
interacting with each other and with other subsystems in the environment [2]. Situative principles
characterize learning in terms of more effective
participation in practices of inquiry and discourse
that include constructing meanings of concepts
and uses of skills. Greeno argues that the situative
perspective can subsume the cognitive and behaviorist perspectives by including both conceptual
understanding and skill acquisition as valuable
aspects of students' participation and their identities as learners and knowers. Teamwork, specifically cross-disciplinary learning, is key to the
design of the A/E/C PBL. Students are expected
to engage with other team members to determine
the role of discipline-specific knowledge in a multidisciplinary project-centered environment, as well
as to exercise newly acquired theoretical knowledge. It is through cross-disciplinary interaction
that the team becomes a community of practitionersÐthe mastery of knowledge and skill
requires individuals to move towards full participation in the sociocultural practices of a larger
community. The negotiation of language and
culture is equally important to the learning
processÐthrough participating in a community
of practitioners (A/E/C), the students are
learning how to create discourse that requires the
constructing meanings of concepts and uses of
skills.
CONTENT DIMENSIONS
The goal of the A/E/C education program is to
significantly increase the number of students who
will understand:
what the three disciplines' role, issues, values, and
cultures are;
. how the three disciplinesÐarchitectural design,
structural design, and constructionÐimpact
each other;
. how new information and collaboration technologies support A/E/C teamwork;
. how information technologies impact the individual's and team's behavior and performance.
Traditional courses teach fundamental knowledge
and give students problems that they can solve
using theory and knowledge, i.e. learning and
exercising know-what and know-how. PBL and
pedagogically informed information technologies
can guide students to discover disciplinary and
interdisciplinary objectives, and thereby to develop
427
know-why knowledge in a cross-disciplinary
context.
In order to achieve these goals the A/E/C
program is structured around the following
activities:
Role modeling that takes place during discipline
lectures, A/E/C round table panel discussions,
project case studies. Discipline lectures present
basic principles, concepts, and goals in each of
the three professions. A/E/C round table panels
focus on the role and the value that each discipline brings to a project, the process that links
the disciplines together, i.e. what information
and knowledge is shared and required across
disciplines. Project case studies bring to the class
signature projects that have been challenging
and innovative in the way they integrate the
three disciplines, e.g. Frank O. Gehry's Bilbao
project, G. Luth Aspen Music Hall. These
real-world projects are dissected from the perspective of all three disciplines as well as
analyzed in terms of cross-disciplinary solutions
to challenging problems.
Information technology lecture series and computer
laboratory exercises that introduce cutting edge
collaboration tools. The concepts, benefits, limitations, and system architectures of these tools
are discussed. During computer laboratory exercises students learn how to use the new collaboration technologies. Students use these
collaboration and information technologies to
support their global team work.
Project-based teamwork in which student teams are
engaged in designing and planning complex and
challenging new buildings. Teamwork is the
process of reaching a shared understanding of
the design and construction domains, the building to be built, the design process itself, and the
commitments it entails. The understanding
emerges over time as each team member develops an understanding of his/her own part of the
project and provides information that allows
others to progress. The process involves communication, negotiation, and team learning.
PROJECT DIMENSIONS
The project that is the driver in the A/E/C
Teamwork education program is discussed as a
function of: project; team formation; and mentoring
and coaching.
Project
Teams of A/E/C students are involved in a
multi-disciplinary building project in which they
model, refine and document the design product
and process. The project is based on a real-world
building project that has been scoped down to
address the academic time frame of two Quarters.
The project requires the design, planning, and
scheduling of the construction of a classroom
428
R. Fruchter
and laboratory facility on a university campus,
with 30,000 sq ft program requirements, a lot, a
$5.5m budget, a time line, and a specific
geographic location (e.g. Oregon, Texas, Florida,
etc.). Each geographic location raises different
challenges from architectural context constraints,
to structural load issues, e.g. earthquake, wind,
snow loads, and construction issue, e.g. access to
construction site, cost, fabrication, constructibility,
etc.
The A/E/C student teams go through two
phases:
1. A concept development phase in which the
team members explore the problem and
solution space and produce four alternative
solutions during the first Quarter.
2. A project development phase in which they
elaborate the A/E/C details of the most challenging and exciting of the four concept
alternatives, during the second Quarter.
The students learn to:
. regroup as the different discipline issues become
central problems and impact other disciplines;
. use computer tools that support discipline tasks
and collaborative work;
. use videoconferencing and desktop sharing technology to have face-to-face meetings, interact
with the teaching team and industry mentors.
The project progresses from conceptual design to a
computer model of the building and a final report.
As in the real world, the teams have tight deadlines, engage in design reviews, and negotiate
modifications. A team's cross-disciplinary understanding evolves over the life of the project. The
students start with individual discipline information and knowledge, using each discipline's natural
idioms.
As the project progresses a number of events are
expected to happen:
. the concepts are transformed into models;
. the models become more detailed;
. discipline models are linked, providing the
students with a building systems integration
perspective;
. information is reorganized so that it can be
shared among the participants.
Typical project examples can be viewed in the
project gallery of PBL under http://pbl.stanford.edu
Team formation
Team formation in the A/E/C education
program has been a function of team size,
member roles, and participant location. The size
of the teams is determined by two factors, (1) the
three disciplines, and (2) the roles, i.e. journeyman
and apprentice. Consequently, each team will have
one architect, one structural engineer, one
construction management student as journeymen
from the MS programs (i.e. 5th year of study
outside US), and one or two apprentice students
from the BS program (i.e. 2nd or 3rd year of study
outside US).
The pedagogical reason behind the decision not
to have more students from any of the A/E/C
disciplines in a team is to ensure that all students
maintain a constant, high engagement in the
project and have a well defined responsibility to
represent their profession within their team. The
geographical location of the team members
provides the students with an opportunity to be
exposed to a virtual teamwork in a cross-cultural
environment, as well as justify the use of information technologies to accomplish the goals of the
project.
Mentoring and coaching
The role of the instructor is changing in a
PBL learning environment, from the traditional
teacher who delivers the course material in class
to the coach. Industry practitioners play the role
of mentors. They become active participants in
the teaching process and education of the next
generation of practitioners.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT)
DIMENSIONS
The roles of information technology (IT) as
mediator and facilitator for improved communication and cooperation within multidisciplinary
teams are determined to support the diverse modes
of interaction over time and space.
Time
Throughout the teaching, learning, and
building project process, participants transition
between synchronous and asynchronous types of
interaction:
. Synchronous collaboration occurs in face-toface meetings. At that time, faculty and practitioners offer lectures and present case studies,
and team members define the overall design
of the future building and determine the
various discipline models. They communicate
discipline concepts and assumptions that may
have cross-disciplinary impacts.
. Asynchronous collaboration, in which (1)
faculty and practitioners provide feedback to
students, (2) students go over course material
delivered over the Internet or via the World
Wide Web, or (3) team members work independently at concurrent or different times on
detailing discipline subsystems of their project.
Space
Faculty, practitioners and students get together
for lectures, round-table discussions, or project
team meetings to review design proposals and
decisions. Such face-to-face meetings can take
place in a collocated setting, where all members
travel to the meeting place, or in a distributed
setting, where team members remain in their
Dimensions of Teamwork Education
offices and use network applications (e.g. groupware, video conferencing) to share and exchange
information and discuss their design decisions.
Knowledge management
Needs of content capture, sharing, exchange,
and reuse have to be met. Project team members
work on their discipline design solutions. As the
design progresses, team members, faculty and
industry mentors need to:
. use a shared project workspace to publish
shared 3-D graphic building models to identify
shared interests, multicriteria semantics of graphic features and share symbolic, multicriteria
critiques, explanations from all disciplines, and
expert feedback as they work in a synchronous
mode;
. use discipline models, exchange design information, and change notifications related to
building features in which they expressed a
shared interest, as they work in an asynchronous
mode.
TYPES OF INTERACTION
Interaction must take place among:
. instructor/students, during presentation or
lecture;
. instructor/student, during office or cyber-office
hours;
. peer-to-peer, i.e. student/student and instructor/
instructor;
. students/instructors/practitioners.
A wide spectrum of Internet-mediated, Webbased, and videoconference environments are
provided to support the different types of interactions among learners, instructors and mentors,
such as the World Wide Web is used:
. for team building through an on-line call-reply
for bids game;
. as a medium to capture, share, and re-use conceptual and final design solutions of the teams
asynchronously among students, instructor,
mentors.
Two central shared Web work environments were
developed to support this objective:
1. Shared WWW Project Workspace was created
for each A/E/C project team to archive, share,
access, and retrieve project information that
ranged from sketches, Word documents, Excel
spreadsheets, AutoCAD drawings, e-mail notes,
and CAD-related change notifications [7, 8].
2. Team Discussion Forums are set up for each
team to facilitate asynchronous capture,
sharing, tracking, and re-use of ideas, issues,
and topics raised by students, instructors, or
practitioners [9].
3. Digital Lecture Archive enables interactive
learning, as well as supports the diverse learning
429
styles and preferences goals of the students
anywhere, anytime. Windows Media facilitates
live broadcast, capture, and on-demand access
to digital lectures, A/E/C panels, and team
meetings.
4. Videoconferencing and application sharing are
available to the students for face-to-face meetings in cyberspace, distant learning lectures,
office hours in cyberspace, and final project
presentations.
ASSESSMENT DIMENSIONS
Multidisciplinary teamwork in an information
age learning environment is posing new assessment
challenges. Current studies of university courses in
which technology is a key component tend to focus
on the technologyÐspecifically, on media selection
and media effects. Neither of these issues address
the individual learner [10]. In the A/E/C PBL the
focus is on determining how to design and conduct
an assessment within the perspective of cognitive
and situative learning theory. If traditional assessment methods have limited value in evaluating
a collaborative, multidisciplinary, geographically
distributed team of students, they are equally
ineffective in measuring:
. effective participation in practices of inquiry and
discourse;
. increase in skill acquisition and conceptual
understanding through multidisciplinary collaboration.
The following assessment dimensions have been
developed in conjunction with the A/E/C PBL
program.
Assessment of cross-disciplinary teamwork
learning experience
This proposes a classification of four key dimensions to measure the students' evolution of crossdisciplinary learning during the two Quarters of
the A/E/C program. These dimensions are:
. Islands of knowledge: the student masters his/her
discipline, but does not have experience in other
disciplines.
. Awareness: the student is aware of other
disciplines' goals and constraints.
. Appreciation: the student is interested to understand and support the other disciplines' goals
and concepts and know what questions to ask.
. Understanding: the student can negotiate, is
proactive in the discussion with other disciplines, provides input before the input is
requested, and begins to use the language of
another discipline.
Students respond to a questionnaire in which they
are required to place themselves in this classification at the start of the program, at the end of the
first Quarter of the program and at the end of the
second Quarter of the program. The objective of
430
R. Fruchter
any multidisciplinary education program or class is
for all or the majority of the students to position
themselves at the end of the learning experience in
the understanding category.
An additional key metric is based on a longitudinal assessment that can track the programmatic changes such a cross-disciplinary education
program can lead to. More specifically, a survey
poses the following questions: After this experience, do you plan to take any courses in any of the
other disciplines? Which topics? Preliminary studies
of the past five A/E/C generations indicate that a
large percentage of the students exercise the
option to take classes in the complementary
programs after going through the A/E/C program.
For instance, architects take construction classes,
structural engineers take costing and scheduling
classes, and construction management students
take structural design classes.
1. Assessment of student activity in PBL and the
A/E/C Team Project. Students' activity during
their A/E/C project-based teamwork is based
on the following metrics: discipline solutions,
i.e. mapping the problem and solution space;
synergy of multidisciplinary solutions, i.e. systems' integration; documentation of product
evolution and process; presentation of A/E/C
alternatives.
2. Assessment of value and impact of IT in creating
a richer learning experience includes: (a) the
transition period necessary for the users/team
to adapt and adopt any IT and change their
work habits, the way they interact, share and
communicate; (b) exercising IT to reach out
and leverage the distributed knowledge and
expertise of mentors; (c) the change in social
dynamics; and (d) the impact of IT in the
evolution from synchronous to asynchronous
communication, and from sequential to
collaborative teamwork.
AcknowledgmentsÐThe author expresses her appreciation to
H. Krawinkler, G. Luth, M. Fischer, Bob Tatum from Stanford
University; M. Martin, from the Architecture Department at
UC Berkeley, Vicki Vance May from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo,
Paul Chinowsky from Georgia Tech, Arkady Retik from
Strathclyde University, UK, Ziga Turk from Ljubljana Slovenia
for their participation. The author thanks the dedicated Teaching Assistants; the six generations of students; the industry
support of Autodesk, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, White Pine, and IntelliCorp for providing the necessary
software and hardware. This effort was funded by the NSF
Synthesis Coalition, the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE), the Commission on Technology in Teaching
and Learning (CTTL),and the President's Fund, at Stanford
University.
REFERENCES
1. J. Dewey, Experience and Nature, New York: Dover (1928, 1958).
2. J. G. Greeno, The situativity of knowing, learning and research, American Psychologist, 53 (1998)
pp. 5±26.
3. G. Hatano and K. Inagaki, Sharing cognition through collective comprehension activity, (1991).
4. J. Lave and E. Wenger, SituatedLlearning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, (1991).
5. W. Asimov, Introduction to Design, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (1962).
6. D. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner, Basic Books, Inc., New York (1983).
7. R. Fruchter, K. Reiner, L. Leifer and G. Toye, VisionManager: a computer environment for design
evolution capture, CERA: Concurrent Engineering: Research and Application Journal, 6 (1) 1998,
pp. 71±85.
8. S. Yen, R. Fruchter and L. Leifer, Facilitating tacit knowledge capture and reuse in conceptual
design activities, ASME Conference, September 1999.
9. R. Fruchter, Architecture/engineering/construction teamwork: a collaborative design and learning
space, J. Computing in Civil Engineering, Oct. 1999, 13 (4) pp. 261±270.
10. J. B. Walther, Group and interpersonal effects in international computer-mediated collaboration,
Human Communication Research, 23 (3) March 1997, pp. 342±369.
Renate Fruchter received an Engineering Diploma in Civil Engineering from the Institute of
Civil Engineering Bucharest, Romania (1981), a M.Sc. (1986) and a Ph.D. (1990) in Civil
Engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Dr Fruchter is the
Director of the Project Based Learning Laboratory (PBL Lab) and lecturer in the
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Stanford University. She acts as
Senior Research Associate and leader of the collaboration technologies research thrust at
the Center of Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE), at Stanford University. She
established (in 1993) and leads the development, testing, deployment, and assessment of
the innovative methodology and learning environment for multidisciplinary, collaborative,
geographically distributed teamwork. Her research includes model-based reasoning, qualitative analysis, product and process modelling. Her current research interests focus on
information and collaboration technology for project life-cycle and global teamwork;
education testbeds, larger scale information technology deployment strategies in academia
and industry; metrics, assessment, and benchmarking of information technology impact on
behaviour and performance of multi-disciplinary, virtual teams.